These images came from Warren Jensen the CFO of Electronic Arts who also predicted that the next generation of consoles would all work as living room-based "wireless hubs" that allow gamers to download their software and developers to add more content to games after their release.

Joel starts off by explaining some economic theory about consumer surplus, how price determines demand for your product, and why the classic demand curve is always downward-sloping.

He then goes into how to calculate the optimal price for selling your software in order to maximize profits according to the demand curve and how segmenting your customers into different groups (according to how "rich" they are) will help you squeeze out as many bucks as possible out of each segment.

Just when you think that everything is fine and dandy he goes on to shoot down everything that he explained and discusses why all that theory is wrong in the software business.

The article does discuss some methods of how to price your software but what you really learn is that there aren't any real rules to follow.

Here's a quote from the end of the article to sum up the frustration: The more you learn about pricing, the less you seem to know..

Here's one for anybody who's gotten crap because they play GTA (you know who you are): several burglars tried to rob an old lady while her 3 grandsons just happened to be playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the Playstation 2.

Google Suggest basically looks like the regular Google home page but with one difference: when you start typing in your search in the search field you automatically get an auto completion of suggestions for what you are typing!

Not only are the suggestions pretty accurate but what's more amazing is the speed that they are displayed.

As you may already know, Sony is planning on coming out with the Portable Playstation (PSP) pretty soon, just on the tail of the new Nintendo DS.

But it turns out that some dude (aka a geek) couldn't wait and built his own portable Playstation 2 out of one of those new slim PS2s, a 5" PSone screen, and a Lithium-ion battery pack that's intended to power portable DVD players.

His site documents the entire process of putting the thing together.

Although it looks a bit large in the pictures (you can see some pictures of the final outcome here), the result is still quite impressive and really well done (this guy clearly has some experience doing these kind of things).

Not that I encourage this kind of behavior (wink wink) but if you are fed up with your boss and daydream about getting back at him/her then check out Whack Your Boss.

The "game's" challenge is to find 8 ways to whack your boss and was created by Tom Winkler, the creator of Doodie.com (that used to be one of my favorite sites for quite a while only now they try to install something annoying when you go to the site).

Although I already am familiar with some of the tools (mainly the tools that aren't exclusively for .Net developers, like Dave's Quick Search Deskbar) the new tools that I learned about seem very useful and are real time savers (and some are even free).

I've been hearing about Konfabulator for quite a while now but since I don't really have access to a Mac I've just had to wait till it comes out on Windows.

Well let me tell you: it's totally cool!

You may be asking "what the hell is Konfabulator?"

"Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather."

Probably the best thing about it is that the various widgets look totally awesome (at least for somebody who doesn't work regularly on a Mac).

Just check out some screenshots of it (or better yet, install it and play around with it a bit).

I've given up on trying to use my own software for managing my moblog (due to time restrictions I actually gave up quite a while ago) so I decided to use Flickr.com instead.

What can I tell you: working with Flickr is absolutely awesome.

The entire experience of creating a free account, uploading your pictures, and managing your online photos is pretty close to perfect!

Who the hell has time to work out various random bugs in the system that I wrote??

Now I can easily upload any pictures that I take and you'll be able to see them in my flickr account (if you want to, of course ;).

For now I uploaded all the old Moblog pictures and they are a bit out of order (one of the few annoyances that I encountered with Flickr is that you can't change the order of the pictures that are uploaded).

You'll also be able to see 3 random pictures from there every time you refresh the main page at guymal.com.

Oh yea, you can also use the RSS feeds (RSS 2.0 or Atom) to never miss any picture that I post.

For those who still don't understand blogs and keep asking "why would I want to read what somebody ate for breakfast" there's an interesting "conversation" over at WebProWorld about the importance of blogs, corporate blogs, why blogs are important for search engine optimization and improving your search engine results, and marketing by using blogs.

It may be a bit long (and I admit I didn't read everything there) but you do pick up some pretty interesting stuff just by skimming over the page.

There are also links there to some personal blogs like Jonathan's Blog (who looks like a young dude with a ponytail but just happens to be the President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems) and some other big shots' blogs.

You probably didn't notice, but I removed the Guy's World mailing list a few days ago (if you did notice then you win a free 21 hour day pass to Google.com).

Mailing lists are sooo 2001 and we don't want to be stuck in the past now, do we?

Anyway, the real reason that I removed the list from the site is because it was just too much of a hassle to prepare the issues.

Since we are almost in 2005 and if you haven't seen the letters RSS you probably haven't been using the web for a while (or maybe you're just not a geek :), then just add the Guy's World RSS feed to your favorite feed reader or click here to add Guy's World to your My Yahoo page and you'll always be updated with the latest and greatest from Guy's World.

People, it's time to advance to new "technologies" and leave those old trends behind.

Who knows, maybe in a 10/20 years we also won't see any more fax machines (I doubt it)...

Here's a quick wrap-up of Gnomedex 4.0 before I embark on my long journey home (well, technically I already started it this morning when I drove to San Francisco but the real journey is still ahead of me...).

I met lots of interesting people, most of which made me feel less like a geek than I do in other crowds :o).

There were some great sessions (especially the panels on the future of online advertising and the future of online content), very cool presentations by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Wil Wheaton (the dude who "used to be an actor" ;-), lots of free stuff, and a not so great band.

For those who aren't familiar with Firefox, it's a browser that's slowly becoming more and more popular (some sites even claim that IE has dropped from 95% to 57% of all browsers used to visit the site and Firefox is up to an amazing 18%).

If you're like me and you like video games and get bored while working out then here's an excellent new invention (you can probably guess where I'm going with this): it's a special joystick that makes you work out.

For $700(!) you get a joystick that more than doubles your oxygen consumption and increases your heart rate by about 50 percent.

The article doesn't say anything about what kinds of systems this can hook up to, but I'm guessing that it will work with the major game consoles.

It features many files (mostly personal documents) that people are sharing on P2P networks, probably without knowing about it.

The personal documents that are found there are quite scary to have floating around the Internet, although the site does cover up any names and personal information so you don't have to worry about your personal stuff ending up on the site (just on the P2P networks).

I'm going to double check my computers to see that I'm not sharing anything that I don't know about...

You may find it interesting if you are either looking for a job or interviewing people for a job (or just like brain teasers).

I've actually encountered quite a few brainteasers in job interviews and I enjoy these types of questions. The only problem with these kind of brainteasers is that sometimes interviewers ask questions that have a trick answer.

These trick questions kinda beat the point since either the person has heard the question before and comes out looking like a genius (lucky bastard) or doesn't have enough time to come up with the trick answer and comes out looking stupid.

The trick is to ask questions that show how the candidate thinks, not necessarily the result they come up with.

For a great collection of interview questions (and answers) check out techinterview.org.

If we're already on the topic of some of my favorite applications then here's my favorite video player.

mv2player is a freeware multimedia player that supports subtitles and just works well.

It also has skins and some other goodies but I don't really care about that stuff, I just want it to play my video files, no matter what format they are in and not matter what format the subtitles are in.

According to the site, TrayList "gives you the power of hotkeys, hothits, a media organizer, on screen display (OSD) and statistics features" but the main reason that I like it so much is the hotkeys feature.

It lets you control WinAmp via hotkeys from whatever application you are currently using without having to focus on WinAmp.

You can start and stop playing, change the volume, go to the next and previous songs...all by using keyboard shortcuts no matter what you are currently doing on the PC.

All you need to do is send them the appliance that you are mad at and $100 and they'll send you back a digital video of your appliance being "obliterated using the latest in Concussive Computer Catastrophe Technology"!

For those who don't know what a steadycam is I'll quote from the site:

Steadycams are attachments used to capture smooth looking video even when the camera and camera operator are in motion. The camera operator may walk (or even jog), move through tight hallways and doorways, and even climb up and down stairs without shaking the camera. Unfortunately, professional steadycams cost around $1500. Even the cheap 3rd party ones cost $600+.

Beyond Connected Home has come out with a microwave oven, a coffee maker, and a bread maker that are powered by Windows CE and can all be remotely controlled over the net (the appliances are licensed from Westinghouse).

The microwave and bread maker have barcode readers that can know how to prepare your food by scanning the food package and they can also download food updates from the Internet.

The coffee maker can be programmed to make coffee different types of coffee at different times of the day and the brewing schedule can be configured from any web browser.

It's been a while since I wrote about GMail so here's something for the lucky people who have managed to get their hands on a GMail account: a collection of GMail tools that will help you make your GMail account more useful.

It ranges from a Perl module for accessing GMail (for the uber geek) to tools to convert your Outlook emails to GMails, address book converters, GMail notifiers, accessing your GMail account with a POP3 mail client...

I wonder if Google will endorse these kind of tools (which will make GMail a lot more useful therefore more successful) or will try to stop these innovations.

To quote a bit from the article: "Spolsky takes a skeptical view of almost every bit of received wisdom he's ever heard about running a software company. His views are refreshing and thought-provoking, and they certainly work in his niche"

The article includes 17 software contrarian insights into how to build a software company, every one of which Joel has put into practice in his own firm.

Very interesting (like just about anything that Joel writes about).

BTW: Read the article this week since the SoftwareCEO archives are available only to paid subscribers.

Paul Graham has an excellent article (like most of the things he writes) about great hackers.

In this article Paul discusses the characteristics of great hackers and why they are so important for creating successful companies.

Paul talks about (among other things) how to identify great hackers (which can be quite difficult since even the hackers themselves don't know how great they are), what types of environments great hackers need in order to work, and what motivates great hackers.